Words By Jack Jones
The Turin Horse
Cinémoi reviews Béla Tarr’s final foray into filmmaking, The Turin Horse. A typically enigmatic and intoxicating journey through the suffering of a father, his daughter and their horse, this is Tarr’s conclusion on the matter of death‘s slow approach. As a finale to a career, The Turin Hourse is the very definition of the bleakness and finality of life when it is close to being extinguished. Director Béla Tarr, a forefather amongst the art house film world, harrowingly captures this very notion through the simple image of an oil lamp; flickering and covorting as a violent wind threatens to blow it out. But its extinguishment at the hands of a sudden force never happens. Rather, the slow and gradual loss of oil, its life source, is the reason the lamp eventually burns out. This exactly mirrors the story of Ohlsdorfer, his daughter and their weary work horse. Without their own life source, the horse, they are destined to endure extreme poverty and certain death. For Tarr the routine and almost inevitable path towards death is what is fascinating. These people cannot escape their situation and appear ambivalent to their impending plight. This is their way of life and existence. Mortality, it seems, doesn’t enter their consciousness. But like the oil lamp, the end is not quick or forthcoming. And in Tarr’s signature style of long, unwavering takes, you really feel every last grain of life slipping away.
Though The Turin Horse is ostensibly a heavy and emotional piece, Tarr’s black comic humour is still present. Less so than in his previous film The Man From London which, thanks to some odd dubbing, had an air of absurdity about it, The Turin Horse does have a few moments that provoke an almost guilty chuckle. Hard to comprehend when you consider the film’s opening shot has the apocalyptic atmosphere of John Hillcoat’s The Road. Indeed, this film has throughout its entirety a feeling of life on its last legs and a morbid nihilism that is as uncomfortable as it gets. A few introductory words are spoken as a wind swept man and his beleaguered horse pulls a cart across a desolate terrain. The voice over tells a tale about how the famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once saw the whipping of a stubborn horse in the street and that it so disturbed him that he lay silent and demented till the day he died. The voice then concludes: “We do not know what happened to the horse.” With little explanation we are left to assume that the travelling man and his horse are the very same pair that so tormented Nietzsche until his death. From here, the narrative is solely
focused on the lives of the three wandering corpses; the man, his daughter and the horse For those who are unfamiliar with Tarr’s somber tone, the overriding sensation may prove difficult. What exactly is he getting at? Not only is The Turin Horse a depiction of a path towards death, it is also a exercise in its monotony. At times it seems that Tarr has said all he can on the matter after 90 minutes but is determined to make you feel every last breath. Structuring the film over one week and a use of titlecards to denote each day, you are able to track the timeline of how close you are to their end. But so mundane and indistinguishable are each of the days that frustration inevitably grows. With repeating scenes of dining on boiling hot potatoes and the ceaseless battering of the wind outside their hut, this is a place that you’ll want to escape from pretty quickly. Yet so magnetic and compulsive is the first 90 minutes that you can’t look away. And even though Tarr has this view of making you
“this film has throughout its entirety a feeling of life on its last legs and a morbid nihilism that is as uncomfortable as it gets.” feel his films as much as you experience them, the method brings some masterful rewards. Tarr’s continued collaboration with composer Mihály Vig produces a majestically haunting score with which to pair to Tarr’s desolate images. Like a slowly approaching train, Vig’s score at times lingers then grows until its creschendo. Ringing over and over in the manner of Tarr’s direction, this is a score that tells the story as much as the images. Working again in monochrome photography, this is a very different style to that of the noir like mist of The Man From London. Shot more in the grainy quality of Tarr’s previous work such as Damnation and Werckmeister Harmonies, cinematographer Fred Kelemen who also shot The Man From London - has produced some startling results. Inside the barn is a place draped in shadow, only lit by the aforementioned oil lamp, but still Kelemen is able to capture every wrinkle of each characters’ face and their creaking bodies. All of these elements once again prove that cinema is very much a collaborative form.
Nevertheless, Tarr is the man behind the curtain pulling all the strings and this is very much his vision. Tarr’s reach as a filmmaker undeniably unique as his style has influenced even some of the great filmmakers of modern cinema. One advocate, in particular, has been Gus Van Sant who has adopted Tarr’s propendency of long takes. The results can at times be irkesome as much as they are lingering and poetic - see Last Days. And there are moments when the message seems to be lost amongst the pretention. But once a filmmaker such as Tarr stops making films, it’s time to sit and admire the craftwork and cherish that cinema of this ilk doesn’t come around that often. Tarr is a filmmaker like few others and for his last film it seems that the director has said all he wants to say. An interesting double bill would be this and Steven Spielberg’s much maligned War Horse, just to see how great filmmakers interpret the world in different ways and have differing sentiments of the world is like. Oh, and the for the horses too.
The Turin Horse is in cinemas 1 June